New Haven’s harbor scales up The fight to preserve Native languages The stories geology tells
Yale’s studentdriven jazz scene
THE MAGAZINE ABOUT THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N YA L E & N E W H AV E N
VOL 50 / ISS 5 / APR 2018
THE NEW JOURNAL
MULTIPLE CHOICE Inside New Haven’s Education Controversy 1
THE NEW JOUR NAL
editors-in-chief Mark Rosenberg Annie Rosenthal managing editor Arya Sundaram senior editors Antonia Ayres-Brown Chris Hays Robert Scaramuccia associate editors Laura Glesby Max Graham Rachel Koh Sohum Pal Elliot Wailoo
copy editors Kofi Ansong Yonatan Greenberg Sofia Laguarda Sara Luzuriaga Eliana Swerdlow
reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund
executive design editor Julia Hedges
advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, Eric Rutkow, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin
associate design editors Felicia Chang Meher Hans photo editors Robbie Short Vivek Suri web developer Philippe Chlenski
members and directors Emily Bazelon, Lincoln Caplan, Linda Colman, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Juliana Hanle, Kathrin Lassila, Elizabeth Sledge, Fred Strebeigh
friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, John Rosenberg and Susan Bennett, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen
Dear readers, The New Journal’s history begins in 1967, when our intrepid founders took it upon themselves to create a publication suited to cover the city and the University in an era of seismic change. This issue, we’re turning back the clock 175 million years, to another era of seismic change: the moment when Connecticut broke off from Pangaea. In our first piece sponsored by the Edward B. Bennett III Memorial Fund, Christine Xu explores how Connecticut’s geological history has shaped New Haven’s development and the way its inhabitants relate to their surroundings. The Fund was established in memory of beloved TNJ alum “Edder” Bennett, who revived the magazine in the 1980s and laid the foundation for the work we do today. We hope the Fund will make ambitious reporting projects like Christine’s more accessible to student reporters for decades to come. This magazine was conceived as a publication devoted to covering “the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new.” (“Besides,” our founders continued, “things seemed to be getting slow around here.”) Fifty-one years later, we’re thinking about what the New Yale looks like today, and what demands that creates for student journalism. To that end, we aim to provide a thoughtful, well-researched and well-written take on the biggest stories of the moment –– and to draw your attention to things that may not make it into the news. We want to live up to our motto, “The Magazine About Yale & New Haven,” by engaging with our campus and our city in a passionate, attentive way. And we want to make you laugh. This issue is inspired by each of those ideas. Our cover story examines a fierce debate about New Haven’s public schools that swept the city this spring. Bringing the theme of education to campus, two snapshots delve into the ways that undergraduates are pushing Yale to expand its offerings in jazz and indigenous languages. We’ve got pieces on the Port of New Haven, medical actors, Connecticut’s roller derby scene, and so much more. We hope you enjoy reading, and, both now and throughout the year ahead, we’d love to hear from you. Annie Rosenthal and Mark Rosenberg, Editors-in-Chief The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All contents Copyright 2018 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.
THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 50 issue 5 april 2018
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SINCE 1967
cover www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com MULTIPLE CHOICE What is the future of education in New Haven? With the city up in arms, three schools may hold the answer. Mark Rosenberg
30 feature supported by the Ed Bennett III Memorial Fund PANGAEA’S EDGE New Haven sits on the birth scars of the Atlantic Ocean. The rocks here tell the story of its human history. Christine Xu standards 4
points of departure PLAYING SICK — Rachel Koh GILDING THE GREEN — Talia Schechet I (ALMOST) GOT CLOBBERED BY YOUR MOM — Jacob Sweet
10 snapshot A VOCAL REVIVAL — Katherine Hu The stakes are high for Native American Yalies fighting to learn their own languages. 14 snapshot THE MUSIC AT THE MARGINS — Amanda Thomas A group of undergrads is working overtime to get Yale to take jazz seriously. 16 snapshot THE SHIPPING NEWS — Dimitri Diagne What will an expansion of the Port of New Haven mean for the workers down at the docks? 28 poem ANATOMY OF OBSERVATION — Fernando Rojas 38 3
endnote A MAGE IN THE MAKING — Henry Reichard THE NEW JOUR NAL
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
PLAYING SICK Meet the people performing pain to teach doctors to listen. Rachel Koh
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RYAN PATEL, a 30-year-old therapist, sits before a fidgeting first-year medical student. Aryan needs medical attention: He has a fever, severe nasal congesion, and a sharp constant pain in his right cheek bone. He anxiously kneads his knee with his hand, unable to stop thinking about his blood tests: are his blood sugar levels too high? The medical student clasps his hands together and nods nervously. “Oh, I see. Okay,” he says. He runs through the script in his mind: Elicit details of the patient’s symptoms. Ask about past medical care. What he forgets is: How is your family? How are you feeling? Because he is not asked, Aryan does not reveal that he fears he’s inherited his father’s Type 2 Diabetes. He is constantly fatigued, and his tiredness has left him distant, distracted. As the interview limps to resolution, Aryan looks reserved, tense, and forlorn. Unspoken discomfort hangs in the air. “Great, thank you, that’s great,” comes a voice from the corner of the room. With those words, the simulation ends. The room breathes a sigh of relief. The observing doctor chuckles, “You did a great job. Made me very nervous.” He then gives the medical student a chance to re-attempt parts of the conversation, to offer a warmer tone, to ask more personal questions, and to project more empathy. Once the student is through, ‘Aryan’ stands up, breaks into a brilliant smile, and ambles out of the room. We are sitting in a small classroom in the Yale School of Medicine’s Hope Building, where four first-year medical students and an experienced physician are conducting a workshop on interviewing patients. ‘Aryan’ is one of many actors –– termed Standardized Patients, or SPs — paid to portray patients in medical simulations. SPs were first introduced in the United States in the nineteen-seventies, and have since become a routine part of every medical student’s training and assessment process. These patients are played by a motley crew of retirees, aspiring actors, and college students. The ailments they perform are largely mundane –– sinusitis, chest pain –– but their surface symptoms come with deep-seated anxieties and complex backstories. For the medical student, the objective is to get the information they need while ensuring that the “patient” remains comfortable. But this is no simple task. SPs memorize character sketches with the patient’s background, medications, emotional contexts, and family history. To uncover all of this in a twenty-minute interview, students 4
illustration by Meher Hans
must be persistent and probing, but also inviting and kind. One script used in today’s workshop spells out what a patient coming in with heel pain should divulge, but only if pressed further: If asked, the pain feels like a knife when you take a full step. If asked, you like to wear boots or shoes with a medium-sized heel to look professional. Finding the right question is key. If they ask a yes-or-no question, all they get is a yes or a no. If they ask open-ended questions, they are rewarded with more information. With patience and practice, students learn to gently unravel the personal contexts that underlie patients’ symptoms. Through simulations with SPs, medical students cultivate the skills necessary for patient-centered healthcare, which situates symptoms in the context of the patient’s broader emotional well-being and lifestyle. Dr. Auguste Fortin, professor at the Yale School of Medicine, is internationally recognized for his educational work in improving clinicians’ communication skills and patient experience. “[It] is not just touchy-feely… to use patient-centered interviewing skills,” he said at a physician-patient communication conference held in 2011. He rattled off a litany of benefits: more accurate diagnoses, improved medication compliance, fewer tests and referrals, and faster symptom resolution. In short: better healthcare, with happier patients and doctors. The American healthcare system is uniquely inefficient. A 2016 report by Gallup shows that Americans are dissatisfied with the services they receive, even while spending twice as much on healthcare compared to citizens of other developed nations. In important ways, this inefficiency is a product of a system that does not promote listening to its patients. As Dr. Fortin argues, “We interrupt our patients prematurely an average of twenty-one seconds into a visit. When we do that, we fail to address the patient’s concerns, and we fail to really understand the patient’s full agenda for why they are seeking healthcare.” When doctors do not convey empathy, patients feel alienated. Alienated patients don’t take their medication, adhere to advice, or follow up on referrals. SPs form the flesh and blood of the shift towards patient-centered healthcare. At times, their work places extreme emotional demands on them. Jackie Sidle worked as a SP in and around New Haven for fourteen years before becoming Coordinator of the SP program at THE NEW JOURN AL
Danbury Hospital. In one of her most demanding roles, she played a woman with borderline personality disorder. “That was very difficult because she was suicidal,” said Jackie, her tone darkening. “She had been sexually abused and raped when she was nine. She was a drug user. She was so sad. And she was mean, so that was hard.” Nursing students on their psych rotation often left in tears after their encounter. “It’s real. It feels real,” Jackie said. “I mean, there’s medical equipment around you, there’s someone in a white coat and a stethoscope, and you’re sitting in a hospital gown. You’re innately very vulnerable.” SPs find different ways to navigate the reality of their characters’ lives. Some bring pictures of their own kids. Jackie used an alias every time, a combination of her middle name and the street she lived on in Chicago. She never liked using her real name. “It just felt like bad karma,” she said, shaking her head. Another difficult role: being the recipient of bad news. Jackie recalled workshops for “Disclosing the Unexpected Death of a Loved One”; in one case, the trainee had to tell a man that his 50-year-old wife, who came in for a checkup after feeling leg pain on a flight, had died while he went to run an errand. At times, the simulation was so harrowing that the medical students broke down into tears. But it was even more fatiguing for the person who has to pretend, again and again, to discover that their wife is dead. Jackie remembers one SP who volunteered to do the simulation three times in a row –– by the end, she said, “it looked like a truck hit him.” Now, as Coordinator, Jackie limits SPs to no more than two bad news simulations in a row. For the most part, however, simulations do not deal with severe, life-changing diseases or devastating news. In the Yale School of Medicine, SPs flit in and out of rooms with ease, rattling off rehearsed answers to standard questions. Still, one cannot help but be struck by how earnestly students approach the patients before them, and the professionalism and skill with which the patients enact their roles. Outside the simulation, a slight shift in tone, or the minutiae of one’s facial expressions –– even a moment of eye-contact –– can forever alter a patient’s life. But in here, students can make mistakes. They can start over. Slowly but surely, even nervous, fidgeting students learn when to smile and ask the right questions; when to prod, and when to let go; when to talk, and when to simply listen.
— Rachel Koh is a sophomore in Silliman College. She is an associate editor of The New Journal.
5APRIL 2018
THE NEW JOUR NAL
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
GILDING THE GREEN A private organization rebrands the center of New Haven. Talia Schechet
illustration by julia hedges
“W
elcome to the Town Green District!” says Win Davis, Town Green Services’ Executive Director, sitting against an office wall branded with the organization’s logo as he smiles mildly at the camera. “Let’s look at some of the meaningful ways that we make downtown New Haven a better place for everybody.” Shifting images fill the screen: a lamp-lit thoroughfare, a crowd gathered to watch a broadcast of the World Cup. Scenes of hardworking “downtown ambassadors” hanging potted plants and sweeping sidewalks alternate with testimonials from local officials and professionals. In one clip, a bridal shop owner stands before a rack of red and blush dresses.“Developing the neighborhood helps everybody,” she says. Created in 1996 through a ballot referendum, the Town Green District encompasses an L-shaped twenty-seven square-block area cradling its namesake, the New Haven Green. Town Green Services –– the organization that created and oversees the District –– aims “to improve ownership values by making Downtown New Haven an internationally competitive urban environment,” according to its mission statement. A private organization with paid professional staff, Town Green Services collected $1.3 million last year from surtaxes placed on New Haven businesses, but it also receives annual contributions from Yale and the City of New Haven, who contributed $140 thousand and $50 thousand in 2017, respectively. These funds are used for cleanup and beautification initiatives, events, marketing, and the salaries of downtown ambassadors: representatives who patrol Downtown in blue and 6
yellow jackets. These ambassadors share office space with the New Haven Police Department, but they don’t have the authority to enforce law. Instead, they contact officers-on-duty about “quality of life infractions,” which include public intoxication and “aggressive panhandling.” In our interview, Davis tells viewers that contacting police officers helps the ambassadors respond to issues downtown. “But,” he continues, “it also helps us, because people know that when we make a call on our radio or on our telephone, action will come of it.” Quality of life violations also include behaviors like urination and defecation. Locals experiencing homelessness once had access to public bathrooms on the Green, but Town Green Services had them removed, claiming the bathrooms sheltered drug deals and prostitution. Homeless individuals may now use only public bathrooms in the public library and City Hall –– when they’re open –– or else gain access to business bathrooms, lest they incur a fine by relieving themselves in public. Under a 2015 collaboration between the city police and Town Green Services called Project Green Thumb, indigent people cited for quality-of-life infractions were enrolled to clean and beautify the District in lieu of paying a fine. Town Green THE NEW JOURN AL
Services abandoned the initiative when the supervising officer was reassigned. Though the organizations’ main constituents are its surtax-paying business owners, Davis, born and raised in New Haven, affirms it benefits all locals. He recalls the mid-nineties, which preceded Town Green’s conception, as a “real tough time for New Haven,” citing gang violence on Chapel Street and low property values. In addition to “stabilizing” downtown, Davis claims, the Town Green District relieves low-income residential neighborhoods of tax burden because it comprises a disproportionate 12 percent of New Haven’s tax income –– a number he hopes will rise. “As this neighborhood goes,” he intoned, “so go the rest of the city and the residential neighborhoods.” Not everyone agrees with Davis. Laura Barraclough, a professor of American Studies at Yale, rejects Town Greens Services’ everyone-wins mantra. “Simply suggesting that increased growth in the downtown area is going to benefit everyone is inaccurate,” she said, noting that money generated by wealthier neighborhoods tends to be reinvested there. Although Barraclough acknowledges that Town Green is partially a symptom of underfunded municipal governments, she situates it within a troubling trend guided by neoliberalism. Since the seventies, she said, there has been a growing belief that urban governments are neither efficient nor effective and that “the private sector could do better.” As private organizations driven by economic interest take over functions traditionally carried out by the city, Barraclough said, marginalized people, including those experiencing homelessness, are harassed, criminalized, and driven out of public spaces. Business owners and managers in the Town Green District have different ideas about how to treat members of these populations, many of whom solicit money in and around their stores. Leila Crockett, who manages the employee-owned Artist & Craftsman Supply store on east Chapel Street, said she thinks addressing solicitors should involve “providing housing, for a start, for people who don’t have a place to live, services for people who don’t have enough to eat, services for people who have addiction issues.” She acknowledges that “panhandling makes some people really uncomfortable,” but advocates a compassionate approach to interacting with solicitors. “My advice is to treat people who are panhandling like any other person,” she said. “It generally doesn’t bother me, as long as people are polite.” Munaza Ali, who has managed Pitaziki Mediterranean Grill since it opened in 2014, thinks Town Green Services isn’t doing enough to monitor panhandling. “Homeless people walk into my store every day and panhandle,” she said, seated in the restaurant on a Thursday night. “The only changes I’ve seen [made by Town Green] are recy 7APRIL 2018
cling bins.” But Town Green Services is trying to reduce panhandling. Each of its last four annual reports touts statistics of “panhandling interventions”: in the 2017 annual report, that number is 6,791, a 55 percent increase from 2016. During our interview, Davis delineated two types of panhandlers: “passive” and “aggressive.” He describes “passive panhandlers” as solicitors sitting or standing by storefronts. In the District, they must receive permission from shopkeepers before soliciting money in front of businesses. If they don’t have permission, ambassadors ask them to move. Meanwhile, Davis defines “aggressive panhandlers” as people soliciting money who “refuse to take no for an answer” or make physical contact with pedestrians, and “make you feel so uncomfortable that all of a sudden it feels like nothing to pull a dollar out of your pocket just to get that person away from you.” When encountering such solicitors, ambassadors are instructed to give warning before calling the police, sometimes even following solicitors so the police can find them. “The ambassadors are snitches,” said a former machinist who has been homeless for four years, waiting in line for lunch on a Sunday outside Trinity Church on the Green. He said that ambassadors contact the police even when they find people sleeping on the Green. While ambassadors may intend to connect people sleeping outside to shelter, the former machinist, who wished to remain anonymous, sounded frustrated by these encounters. Town Green Services’ mission to make the downtown area prosperous may work at the expense of community members experiencing homelessness, who often cannot patronize the businesses the District was created, in part, to support. “If you’re homeless,” said a disabled former carpenter after collecting parcels of food, “you’re looked down upon, no matter your circumstances.” Despite Win Davis’s greeting, not everyone feels welcome around the Green.
— Talia Schechet is a junior in Saybrook College.
THE NEW JOUR NAL 7
P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E
I (ALMOST) GOT CLOBBERED BY YOUR MOM Connecticut’s roller derby community bashes heads and bucks gender norms. Jacob Sweet
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razy Legz Nikki is barreling down a flat track in quad skates, looking for Your Mom. Your Mom, a blocker, has a decision to make: she can either help Legz, her jammer, carve through a glut of skate-wearing women, or she can get in the way of the opposing jammer, Sass Squash. To make it through unscathed, Legz will have to “dance by” Lehigh Valley’s blockers using the precise footwork she’s been practicing since 2012. Or she can just barrel right through. “We prefer just running people over, in all honesty,” Legz admits after the bout. I drive to the Connecticut Roller Derby Travel Team Double-Header (one match between the CT All-Stars and Lehigh Valley, the other between the CT Yankee Brutals and Shoreline Bella Donnas), fully expecting to be one of maybe thirty or forty spectators. But when I arrive at the Insports Center in Trumbull, Connecticut, the parking lot is full, and I am forced into parking behind a caravan of cars down the street. After ten minutes waiting in line for a ticket, I am greeted by a maple hardwood floor the size of three basketball courts, two commentators, an elaborate sound system, and a projection screen displaying the score. Dozens of vendors line the gym and hundreds of people—from grandchildren to grandparents—sit around the track in home-brought portable chairs brought from home. I didn’t realize this was BYOC. I sit close to the track in an area called “The Danger Zone.” You must be eighteen to sit here because there’s a possibility that one of the roller girls will careen off the track and crush you and your ice-cold Coors Lite. Before I have time to evaluate the risk of my seating location, the buzzer sounds and the bout begins. Eight women, all wearing skates, knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets, begin bodying each other for position. Two skaters, one from each team, fly around the back straightaway. The crowd rumbles in their portable chairs. Perhaps this is not such a niche sport after all. In 1935, roller derby was basically a cross country endurance race. Teams of two would circle around a banked track over and over, covering three thousand miles in total, approximately the distance from New York City to Los Angeles. After realizing crowds enjoyed
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the collisions more than the skating, Leo Seltzer, the sport’s founder, tweaked the game to add more physical contact. It took off. By 1949, the National Roller Derby playoffs sold out Madison Square Garden for an entire week, and the sport was broadcast on CBS. When that contract expired, ABC started televising games. But by the early nineteen-seventies, the sport sputtered out. The 1973 oil crisis made it prohibitively expensive for teams to travel, and the Roller Games’ International Skating Conference’s uncompetitive, circus-like approach to the game turned off fans. In 2000, Daniel Eduardo Policarpo, also known as “Devil Dan,” attempted to re-ignite the sport as an allwomen roller derby-themed spectacle with winners selected before the match. After a highly suspect logistical meeting in a bar, the recruited women decided to ditch Dan and form their own organization: Bad Girl Good Woman Productions. They changed the rules and formed a league. Winners would no longer be pre-ordained. Now it wasn’t just a show; it was a competition. And it wasn’t “women’s roller derby” –– it was just roller derby. (Men’s derby exists, but it’s not nearly as popular. For men, there’s a wider range of highly physical, competitive outlets to choose from. Roller Derby is also one of the only sports that allow trans athletes to compete as women without undergoing hormone therapy, distinguishing it from any Olympic event.) The sport continues to grow in popularity. In 2006, the CT Roller Derby began with about fifteen skaters. Now they have about sixty-five. “We have moms, we have younger women, we have older women, we have cis women, we have trans women,” Your Mom, also known as Nolan Smith, tells me. “We have every race and age you could think of. Everybody has a home here.” Roller derby consists of two thirty-minute halves, each broken up into two-minute sections called jams. Each team plays with five athletes at a time, and there are two main positions: jammer and blocker. The jammer’s goal is to score, which she does by weaving through a horde of blockers and lapping members of the opposing team. Blockers, four on each squad, play offense and defense at the same time. They help their jammer get through the THE NAL THENEW NEWJOUR JOURN AL
pack and prevent the other team’s jammer from doing the same. At the end of each jam, new jammers and blockers switch onto the track. The game shifts between fast and slow. All-Star jammer Black Cherry weaves, hops, and sprints through small holes in the Lehigh Valley defense. Legz looks for an opening and pile-drives through. At times, the jammer gets stuck behind a wall of opposing blockers. When Black Cherry hops over a defender’s outstretched leg, the crowd cheers. About ten years ago, the sport was high-speed and punk-rock. Players drank beer before matches, wore fishnet tights, and pummeled each other. Roller Derby was little more than flying around the track and laying hits. Derby names –– Your Mom, Krazy Legz Nikki, Puke Skywalker –– are a carryover from this campy era. “For a long time it was just skate fast, turn left,” Smith says. “It was never a show, it was never pretend … but over time it’s changed from a game where people go as fast as they can to a game with strategies and formations.” Today, players treat the game more seriously. The CT All-Stars practice three days a week, two hours each day. They practice formations and watch tape. Athletes on the All-Stars are also expected to cross-train outside of practice –– weight lifting, running, core workouts. If you’re not strong, you’re more likely to sprain an ankle, break a clavicle, or tear an ACL. Almost every athlete I talk to, from Scorin’ Kierkegaard to Midwife Crisis, has an injury story; during the match, I notice All-Star Captain Puke Skywalker standing on the sideline with a walker. The bout ends with a score of 287–153, a convincing All-Star win. But they’re not done for the day. After they change out of their game uniforms, they’ve got other jobs to do. Some coach the B-team, the Yankee Brutals. Others walk around the court selling raffle tickets to keep the nonprofit club afloat. Players, refs, coaches, announcers, and staff are all volunteers. Holding a jug of 50/50 raffle tickets amidst the noisy crowd, Krazy Legz Nikki finds some time to talk. “So you’re gonna write about how awesome we are? On and off the track? Should I put my hair down and try to fluff it up? Don’t mention the sweat—or the pops and bruises.” She points out a welt on her shoulder that seems to become darker each minute I talk to her. “This one’s gonna be good if you want a picture of that.”
illustration by julia hedges
— Jacob Sweet is a senior in Grace Hopper College. 9
THE NEW JOUR NAL 9
SNAPSHOT
A VOCAL REVIVAL The stakes are high for Native American Yalies fighting to learn their own languages. Katherine Hu
photos by robbie short
Bobby Pourier, left, attends a class in the Lakȟóta language at the Native American Cultural Center. Pourier and other Native students are working to get their indigenous languages taught for credit before the languages disappear.
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s the golden sun begins to tumble down the horizon, the Native American Cultural Center, or NACC, comes to life. The lights in the conference room buzz on, illuminating wooden tables accented with a dotting of pastel chairs: sky blue, lavender, mint. It’s Monday night, and I’m attending a class in Lakȟóta, a Native American language spoken by around two thousand people in North and South Dakota. There are five students in class tonight. While each belongs to the Lakȟóta nation, they represent three different tribes. Bobby Pourier, Jacob Rosales, and Marlee Kelly are Oglála Lakȟóta and attended Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation together. Chase Warren is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta, and Luta Fast Dog is Sicangu Lakȟóta. They filter in slowly, cupping freshly steeped tea from the kitchen and snacks from their dorm rooms. Each finds a seat near the TV, where Nacole Walker, a Lakȟóta language instructor at Sitting Bull College in North Dakota, Skypes in. The students prop open laptops and set down stuffed animals: a llama, jackrabbit, and small metal frog, part of today’s lesson on postpositions. Unlike English, Lakȟóta 10 10
uses postpositions rather than prepositions, placing words after a noun to indicate its relative location. “I didn’t have a plush toy!” Pourier protests, wielding his metal frog for the camera. The room bubbles with laughter. As class commences, seriousness settles in, interspersed with wide-grinned laughter. Walker prompts each student by name, asking them to describe the relative locations of their stuffed animals. In many ways, this class is like any other language seminar at Yale. Each student has a reference text open on-screen (the New Lakota Dictionary). Their laptops are decorated with stickers (“Yale Native,” “Mahalo Ke Akua,” and “Blue State Coffee”). But there’s one notable difference: even though these students meet twice a week for an hour each time and are assigned homework, as they do in other Yale classes, they aren’t receiving course credit. “Tokša akhé waŋčhíyaŋkiŋ kte,” the five chant in unison, as Walker waves goodbye. In English, it means, “I will see you later.” While only a handful of universities like the University of Oklahoma, University of North Dakota, and University of THE NAL THENEW NEWJOUR JOURN AL
South Dakota offer indigenous language courses for credit, universities around the country are shifting towards doing so. Peer institutions like Stanford and Dartmouth both offer Native American Studies majors and a wide selection of courses on Native American history. The University of Pennsylvania plans to offer Cherokee language classes soon, and hopes to expand to other Native American languages that can fulfill the four-semester Penn Language Requirement, per the Daily Pennsylvanian. The Yale NACC’s Native American Language Project, founded in 2015, offers seven courses: three intermediate classes in Cherokee, Choctaw, and Native Hawaiian, and four elementary classes in Lakȟóta, Mohawk, Navajo, and Ojibwe, including the class I’m sitting in today. But unlike its peers, Yale treats these rigorous seminars more like extracurriculars than coursework. Taking Lakȟóta doesn’t get a student any closer to a Yale degree, even though, as Walker explains to me, she teaches her students with the curriculum she uses at Sitting Bull. In the United States, 150 to 170 indigenous languages remain, remembered primarily by tribal elders due to years of targeted assimilation policies by the federal government. From 1869 to the mid-twentieth century, Native American children around the country were sent to government boarding schools meant to “civilize” them. At school, students were abused for speaking their indigenous languages, taught to reject their culture. Hoping to spare their descendants the same ordeal, many chose not to teach the languages to their children, who, in turn, have found themselves unable to pass the knowledge along. As Pourier explained to me, “My great-grandmother went to a boarding school where she was routinely beaten, and had her mouth washed out with soap if she spoke Lakȟóta. As a girl, she decided never to speak the language or pass it down to her children so they wouldn’t suffer the same abuse. No one in the family spoke Lakȟóta out of fear of persecution.” First-year student Gabriella Blatt, a member of the Chippewa-Cree Tribe in Montana and my suitemate, has a similar story. Back home on the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, less than twenty of the five thousand residents are fluent in Cree. Her mother can’t speak the language, and it wasn’t until her grandmother’s dying breath that Blatt heard her speak Cree for the first time. For students like Blatt and Pourier, the stakes are high: if their generation does not learn the languages of the elders, these languages will vanish entirely. And language is more than just a way to communicate –– for Native Americans and indigenous peoples, language is inseparable from culture, Pourier says. “I have to reintroduce myself to my own culture. As a colonized person I can’t understand traditional ceremonies. Because I don’t understand the language, I can’t understand it on a spiritual level,” he explains. APRIL 2018 11
Currently, tribes across the United States are working diligently to revive their languages. Pourier’s reservation school is in its fifth year of operating a language immersion program that runs from pre-K through the twelfth grade. Soon, they will graduate their first students who are fully fluent in Lakȟóta. The question is whether the value of such bilingualism will be recognized by institutions like Yale. Prominently displayed on a shelf in the NACC’s upstairs living room is “A Party Game for Indigenant Peoples,” known as Cards Against Colonialism. Its battered red box
But there’s one notable difference: even though these students meet twice a week for an hour each time and are assigned homework, as they do in other Yale classes, they aren’t receiving course credit. is lovingly frayed around the edges, and rests beside a pristine edition of Cards Against Humanity, its fraternal twin. It’s easy to tell which one is more popular on game night. Next to the card games rests a whiteboard covered in the languages of the NACC community, from Cree to Lakȟóta, Navajo to Mohawk, Chinese to German. While many indigenous students are taking languages like Chinese and German to fulfill their language requirement, it’s often not their first choice. First-year Madeleine Freeman, who is both Choctaw and Chickasaw, studied Turkish from the fourth to the tenth grade and will continue to take it at Yale to fulfill her language requirement. How-
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ever, she says that she would switch to Choctaw in a heartbeat. She explains that one of the reasons she chose Yale was because Choctaw is taught here, and she was unaware that she wouldn’t receive credit. Until the rules change, she’ll continue to take informal classes through the NALP. “Choctaw is mine, there’s a personal connection to it,” Freeman explains. “It’s a language that needs people to speak it, and it’s my duty to speak this language. There’s something deeper within myself that I don’t get aside from speaking Choctaw.”
At school, students were abused for speaking their indigenous languages, taught to reject their culture. Yale offers a smorgasbord of languages for students to pick and choose from in its Blue Book, which lists its official course offerings for each year. This includes more popular courses such as Spanish, French, and Chinese, and less highly enrolled languages such as Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, Coptic, Kiswahili, Sanskrit, Yoruba, and Zulu,
all of which grant language credit. Yale gets creative in order to provide the latter group of languages. Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, per its course description in Blue Book, is taught using distance learning. That entails videoconferencing in a teacher from Columbia University, much like how Walker Skypes in to the NACC conference room twice a week. While Yale has never offered an indigenous or Native American language class for credit, it offers support through Directed Independent Language Study, or DILS, a program that allows students to study languages that Yale doesn’t offer. Students can’t get course credit through DILS, but they can receive sessions with a language partner twice a week and advice from staff at the Center for Language Study, or CLS. In the past, DILS has supported students interested in learning Choctaw, Inupiaq, Lak Lakȟóta, Navajo, Salish, and Tohono O’odham, according to Nelleke Van Deusen-School, Director of CLS. While many indigenous students opt to take classes through the NALP instead because it offers an actual class structure, high demand through DILS can bolster petitions for an official language class to be offered through Yale. This spring, Yale piloted an American Sign Language course in part due to the fact that 117 students enrolled in its DILS offering over an eight-year period. Getting a language recognized at Yale is no small task.
The five students in Nacole Walker’s Lakȟóta class look on as she lectures on postpositions. Many language classes at Yale with small enrollments rely on distance-learning methods
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The process begins when CLS considers a proposal and consults with the department that would offer the language. Next, CLS assesses demand and requests resources from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office. If resources are approved, the Course of Study Committee approves individual pilot courses so that Yale can see if they can offer enough levels in the language to fulfill the language requirement. The full program then goes before a vote of Yale College faculty, completing the process. Currently, students within the NACC are actively petitioning CLS for language classes, continuing efforts from years past. While faculty members in the department were hesitant to comment on the issue, Vee Cangiano, Coordinator of DILS, cites the relatively low demand. According to Cangiano, the number of students taking ASL over the last eight years was “two to three times the demand for all Native American languages combined.” Another concern expressed by administrators is the dearth of college-level textbooks and curriculum for indigenous languages. Organizations such as the Lakota Language Consortium, or LLC, are working to address this issue. LLC is a nonprofit working to revitalize the Lakȟóta language through writing textbooks, producing curricula, and offering summer immersion programs. They have helped universities like the Universities of North and South Dakota set up their Lakȟóta language departments and are reworking a textbook for the postsecondary level. “It’s an American value to give everyone the right to decide for themselves, but this right was never given to Native Americans,” said Wilhelm Meya, Chairman of the Lakota Language Consortium. “They were here before the Europeans and had over five hundred languages spoken alongside histories, cultures, and prayers that were all embedded within their languages. Nearly a hundred years
“It’s an American value to give everyone the right to decide for themselves, but this right was never given to Native Americans,” said Wilhelm Meya, Chairman of the Lakota Language Consortium. of institutionalized policies forced them to conform to English. No one is going to deny the power and utility of English, but you can’t take away the right to their indigenous language from them.” For some indigenous students, the university’s failure to grant credit for Native languages adds insult to injury: many of them come from under-resourced schools that can’t offer foreign language classes. On the Rocky Boy Indian Reservation, Blatt says, her high school only had ten teachers 13APRIL 2018
spread over 120 high school students. As such, there weren’t enough teachers for her high school to offer foreign language courses. Pourier says that while indigenous students are “anything but a single story,” those who grew up on reservations often deal with culture shock alongside the usual demands made of Yale students. As a result of centuries of colonial policies enacted by the U.S. government, Native American communities are some of the poorest in the nation –– Pine Ridge Reservation has an 80 percent unemployment rate, according to Al-Jazeera. Unlike Pourier, Blatt didn’t start self-studying her native language, Cree, until getting to Yale. As she sits cross-legged on the wine-colored armchair in our common room, she
“Coming here made me realize how important it is to hold onto what I have. My culture is dying, and my refusal to learn something as simple as the language is a contribution to the death of it,” Blatt said. explains that her mother attended an Indian boarding school with the mantra “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” As such, her mother was hesitant when Gabriella began join Facebook groups like “Cree Simon Says,” which offers one hour lessons each day through Facebook Live. “On the reservation, I was surrounded by my culture,” Blatt said. “Coming here made me realize how important it is to hold onto what I have. My culture is dying, and my refusal to learn something as simple as the language is a contribution to the death of it,” she explains. Later that night, under the chandeliers of the Branford dining hall, Pourier explains to me that in the Lakȟóta nation, they don’t refer to it as “learning” their language. Rather, they call it “remembering.” He explains that members of his tribe see the language as part of their spirit, built into their genetic code. Speaking is merely the body catching up, remembering what has been lost. He sits up, gesturing across the table at Rosales. “Whenever I speak Lakȟóta, it’s my spirit speaking to Jacob’s spirit. Whenever I speak English, it’s my body speaking to Jacob’s body. The ancestors’ spirits back home hear us, and they know we are out here.” He smiles, tugging on the strings of his pink hoodie. “They know that we are not lost. Whenever we speak Lakȟóta, it’s as if we are home.”
— Katherine Hu is a first-year in Ezra Stiles College 13 THE NEW JOUR NAL
SNAPSHOT
THE MUSIC AT THE MARGINS A group of undergrads is working overtime to get Yale to take jazz seriously. Amanda Thomas
T
he Saybrook Underbrook, a performance space in the basement of the college, is unusually packed. The crowd spills over from rows of chairs and onto the stairs. They’re all waiting for New York Times-featured saxophonist Steve Wilson featured with his pianist and friend Pete Malinverni. Whispers of anticipation fill the room as the performers explain that they will play whatever music speaks to them. Malinverni’s feet zealously tap to the beat as his fingers dance around the keys. Wilson carries the rhythm, holding a prolonged brassy note with impeccable breath control. Malinverni jumps from one end of the keys to the next in a jumble of complex notes. A woman in the front row is smiling, wide-eyed, nodding, entranced by the music, the rhythm and energy of the performers. A few rows behind her, a man sits with closed eyes, tapping his feet along. This is happening on a Saturday night for the annual Yale Jazz Festival, organized by student members of the Yale Undergraduate Jazz Collective — and all in the name of jazz. The Collective, a nine-member group of undergraduates, also brings established jazz musicians like E.J. Strickland and Nicholas Payton to Yale for free concerts, hosts jam sessions, organizes master classes, and plans the annual three-day Festival. But despite all it does, the group survives on grants from the Dean of Arts and Saybrook College, with no guarantee that the funding will continue next year. Founded in 2012, the Undergraduate Jazz Collective has become key for students at Yale interested in jazz. When sophomore Hersh Gupta arrived at Yale, he had been playing saxophone seriously for years and was excited to play with other like-minded musicians. This year, however, only two faculty members specialize in the genre, and the School of Music offers only two academic courses on jazz. There are only three jazz combos, one ensemble, and no private instruction in jazz performance. The audience at the Collective’s events spills out the door; someone sitting in the crowd might not know that these students are going it alone.
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illustration by felicia chang
I
n 2015, when the building that houses the ensemble practice room was closed for renovation, the group’s director decided to cease operations for the following year. Frustration among Yale students boiled over, and word of the controversy spread beyond campus borders: the New York Times published an article about the Collective’s dissatisfaction with the university’s efforts to teach jazz studies. Dean Robert Blocker, Dean of the School of Music, told the Times, “We train people in the Western canon and new music,” suggesting that the university had space for classical music but not jazz. Blocker continued by saying that he was interested in hiring a saxophone teacher, but only if they could teach the classic repertory as well. Yale’s classical music bias is evident in its faculty, which is primarily composed of classically-trained musicians, and includes degree programs that offer instruction in classical, chamber and baroque music, but not an official jazz studies program. In July 2016, after the article, Blocker announced on the Yale School of Music’s website that the School of Music had been offered “an anonymous gift… to continue and expand its legacy of jazz studies at Yale.” Out of that gift came the Yale Jazz Initiative, a commitment by the School of Music to expand the legacy of jazz at Yale. The initiative involved bringing in musicians like Grammy-winning saxophonist Wayne Escoffery for jazz improv lessons, and opening the
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“AFRICAN-AMERICANS USE MUSIC AS A WAY TO ARCHIVE THEIR HISTORY WHEN THEY DIDN’T HAVE ACCESS TO ERECTING THEIR OWN INSTITUTIONAL ARCHIVES,” BROOKS SAYS. “THE MUSIC WAS THE THING WE CAN USE TO DOCUMENT OUR HERENESS, AS WELL AS OUR PAST, AS WELL OUR FUTURITY.” Yale Jazz Ensemble to all Yale students –– not just undergraduates. But Yale has a long way to go in order to rival peer institutions like Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia. Harvard has two eighteen-piece ensembles and brings in jazz masters-in-residence every spring –– this semester, it’s three-time Grammy winning Angelique Kidjo. Princeton offers a Certificate in Jazz Studies which requires four jazz courses, participation in one of the faculty-led jazz ensembles, and a recital performance. Columbia has eight jazz ensembles, including a group specializing in Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz, and it offers thirteen different private jazz instruction courses ranging from jazz piano to jazz vibraphone. The Columbia’s Music Department’s jazz section boasts the Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance program, the Columbia Jazz Composers Collective Recording Series, a Jazz Studies Special Concentration, and a Jazz House where students “live and jam together.” Yale’s website offers a list of members, a schedule of events, FAQ and a mostly dormant livestream broadcasting performances and sometimes rehearsals. Sophomore Nicholas Serrambana, President of the Collective, is an African American Studies major with a music concentration. In his view, the lack of institutional support for jazz at Yale demonstrates a problem with the university’s values. “There is the issue of representation and the canon, and a major controversy is that the School of Music made a statement saying, ‘Look, we’re only interested in classical music and music of the western canon,’” Nicholas says. “Jazz is something that people consider quintessentially American. It’s interesting [that] that’s something that Yale’s not proud of.” Daphne Brooks agrees. A professor in African American Studies, American Studies, Theater Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Brooks teaches classes focused on jazz and co-leads the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, a two-year initiative led by a group that focuses on researching and archiving the history and significance of African American sonic practices. She aims to facilitate more communication between the African American Studies department and the Yale School of Music to create a structured curriculum. “African Americans [have used] music as a way to archive their history when they didn’t have access to erecting their own institutional archives,” Brooks says. “The music was the thing we can use to document our hereness, as well as our past, as well our futurity.” The Yale Jazz Initiative will end in Fall 2019, but the Collective hopes to continue projects like the combo coaching program, which brought renowned musicians like saxophonist Wayne Escoffery and bassist Jeff Fuller to work with the jazz combos. Despite the buzz that the Collective has created, it
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seems that the School of Music does not plan to take on any financial or logistical responsibility for its activities. Serrambana says that working with Dean of the Arts Kate Krier and the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group has been helpful, and that his own band has seen how the Collective has succeeded in increasing attendance and having more inclusive events. He thinks that whether it be through bringing musicians to the Underbrook or putting on a festival, the Collective is doing worthwhile work in giving the Yale community the jazz music that they want to hear, and keeping the conversation going.
O
ne week before the Jazz Festival, the Ensemble holds a special joint rehearsal with the nearby Hamden Hall Country Day School’s jazz band. As the event begins, Melissa Hudson, the band’s smiling director, explains how grateful she is to collaborate with the ensemble. A B flat resounds through the room as woodwind and brass instruments begin tuning. The notes they attempt mingle in the air with small conversation. The sounds eventually devolve into a clamor of instruments, then a pause for clarity –– and the music begins. Gupta is focused, poised and secure, sitting up front with the saxophone while Serrambana nods to the beat, plucking away in the bass section. Feet tap and eyes close as the bands play “Moanin,’” a jazz standard by drummer Art Blakey. A Hamden student shakily attempts a drum solo, and then watches, wide-eyed, as Yale student Colum O’Connor perfects it on his first try. Hudson walks around the room taking pictures with sheer awe on her face. The Jazz Ensemble displays the same soulful energy. It’s impossible to tell that some of its members are planning an entire weekend of jazz in their heads, and hoping for more.
— Amanda Thomas is a first-year in Saybrook College
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SNAPSHOT
THE SHIPPING NEWS What will an expansion of the Port of New Haven mean for the workers down at the docks? Dimitri Diagne photos by vivek suri
M
ichael Vasaturo leads me through maritime fog that covers the Port of New Haven one cool March morning. The cranes of the bulk freighter Cyrenaica G. loom in the blurry distance. As the short, gold-necklaced Vasaturo and I walk along the wharf of New Haven Terminal (NHT), the shipping company where he serves as executive director, he describes a project poised to change the future of the local shipping industry. “The biggest thing that’s going on right now is trying to dredge,” he tells me, referencing a joint initiative of the New Haven Port Authority, the Connecticut Port Authority, and the Army Corps of Engineers to deepen the shipping channel from thirty-five to at least forty feet. The managers of the Port’s seven other terminal companies share Vasaturo’s enthusiasm. In his large, dark office, Vasaturo tells me they all benefit if the port develops. “We all want dredging,” he
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says, as we look across the wharf. By ‘all,’ Vasaturo means his executive colleagues at the Port’s six other terminal companies, all of whom are involved in planning the development. Less clear, at least in this conversation, are the wishes of the terminal employees, repairing machinery and loading trucks in the yard below. The East Coast shipping industry is changing in step with a globalized world. Soon, a widened Panama Canal will give larger ships from East Asia access to East Coast ports like New York and Norfolk. As these shipping centers expand, “the smaller ships are going to get priced out,” Tommy Seda, a former tugboat mate at Gateway Terminal, believes. But if these vessels can’t compete with larger boats at the region’s biggest terminals, Seda thinks there’s another option: “What better place to go than just good old New Haven, right down the street?”
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Seda’s comment captures New Haven’s position in a Northeastern industrial hierarchy. The city knows that it’s no New York, where, Vasaturo reflects, “there’s always vessels in the port, because they supply all the big companies, all the Walmarts, the Targets, the fruit people.” But managers like Vasaturo and Evan Matthews, Director of the Connecticut Port Authority, want it to benefit from the same global trends that make New York prosper. New Haven will never be New York, but it can fill the regional niches its neighbor leaves vacant. “Once the channel gets deepened to forty feet, it’ll be on par with Providence, Boston,” Matthews says over the phone. “It’ll be a deep-water port that’ll help all those companies compete with cargo.” The future of the port looks different from the ground. Cut off from the city by locked fences, security guards, railroad tracks, and I-95, this industrial ecosystem goes largely unnoticed. But on the distant eastern shore of the New Haven Harbor, a legion of terminals and tugboats form the fifty-third largest port in the U.S. Out of New Haven flow gravel and scrap metal, towering in one hundred-foot piles on Gateway Terminal’s property. Much more enters than leaves –– imports include seventy percent of Connecticut’s petroleum. “In terms of petroleum, New Haven may be one of the largest ports on the East Coast,” Vasaturo speculates, as we pass fields of circular white fuel tanks and sprawling pipe lattices. Although the Port of New Haven fuels the city’s fifty thousand trade, transportation, and utilities jobs, it operates under particular and demanding labor rules. The erratic nature of shipping in a small port like New Haven requires many workers to structure their employment around irregular gigs. “It’s a pretty well-synchronized operation, because time is –– everything is –– about production,” Vasaturo says. There’s a lot of production at stake. Ninety percent of global trade is carried over the sea in bulk freighters, container ships, and tankers. At New Haven, unlike the
ALTHOUGH THE PORT OF NEW HAVEN FUELS THE CITY’S FIFTY THOUSAND TRADE, TRANSPORTATION, AND UTILITIES JOBS, IT OPERATES UNDER PARTICULAR AND DEMANDING LABOR RULES. constantly busy Port of New York, this trade comes in fits and starts. While petroleum is, according to Vasaturo, “a pretty regular business,” the arrival of ships carrying dry cargo is negotiated by agents of the terminal company and 17 APRIL 2018
THE ERRATIC NATURE OF SHIPPING REQUIRES MANY WORKERS TO STRUCTURE THEIR EMPLOYMENT AROUND IRREGULAR GIGS . “IT’S A PRETTY WELL-SYNCHRONIZED OPERATION, BECAUSE TIME IS — EVERYTHING IS — ABOUT PRODUCTION,” VASATURO SAYS. the shipping company, and based on local demand. “They were very busy with vessels last week, you know, unloading steel,” Vasaturo says, pointing to an empty barge sitting one wharf over, at a terminal owned by NHT and leased by another company he declined to name for confidentiality reasons. Until regional manufacturers run out of steel coil and the agents reconnect, no one knows when the next barge will arrive. At the Port of New Haven, because of the unpredictable work cycle, terminals find ways to pay workers only when they’re needed. Vasaturo describes the composition of NHT’s workforce before the company left the dry cargo business. “There were the people that worked full time, what we call our terminal workers,” Vasaturo explains, “and they loaded trucks and managed the warehouse.” The neonclad men welding to loud rock music in a tool-crammed, tin-roofed shed at the base of the NHT wharf were terminal workers. “And then there were what you would call traditional stevedores, and they would only work when there were vessels.” When NHT handled dry cargo, they’d call in stevedores, the men responsible for getting cargo off the ships and onto the wharf, and pay them until the unloading was finished. Many of these workers belonged to the International Longshoremen’s Association, the AFL-CIO union for stevedores working on the East Coast, from Canada to Puerto Rico. The ILA in New Haven disbanded in the mid-2000s, and all Port workers are currently non-union, full-time employees of the terminal companies. Full-time, however, doesn’t necessarily mean all the time. “I was used to it,” says Seda, who until 2017 was a fulltime employee of Gateway Terminal, of his intermittent work schedule. “But it’s hard when you have kids at home.” While Vasaturo works on the dry-land, business end of the 17 THE NEW JOUR NAL
industry, the tall, soft-spoken Seda has spent his life on the water. He came up “through the hawsepipe,” starting off as a volunteer deckhand at fourteen, learning on the job, and climbing his way up to officer. After years of captaining tall ships –– old commercial sailing vessels –– at New York’s
SEDA THINKS THERE’S ANOTHER OPTION: “WHAT BETTER PLACE TO GO THAN JUST GOOD OLD NEW HAVEN, RIGHT DOWN THE STREET?” South Street Seaport Museum, Seda moved to New Haven in 2013. For a year, he captained the schooner Quinnipiac, then docked at Long Wharf and owned by the educational nonprofit Schooner Inc. Seda was the last captain of the Quinnipiac before financial troubles forced Schooner Inc. to sell it off. Afterwards, he used some connections in the small maritime world to land a job at Gateway. Despite his captain’s rank, Seda started out as a deckhand on the Gateway tugs. Once he took some classes and got a towing license, he got promoted to mate. “The guys on the tugboats work a two-week long schedule, so they show up on the tug and live on the tug for two weeks,” he explains. They’d get paid during the two weeks on, but not during the two weeks off, during which Seda would travel with his wife and take part-time jobs in construction and ship maintenance. During his on-weeks, there was usually maintenance work to be done, even if no vessels were entering the harbor. “They’re steel tugs,” Seda says, “so all they want to do is rust. It’s a constant battle against rust.” It was only once “in a very blue moon” that there wasn’t enough work and Gateway would tell its tug workers, some of whom flew in from Florida or drove down from Maine, not to come in for their two-week shifts. Even given the weeks without pay, Seda is gracious to his former employer, telling me that Gateway tries to avoid leaving workers without jobs and provides full benefits. He describes New Haven’s shipping industry as a relatively prosperous, fraternal environment, largely free of conflict between workers and companies, despite the turbulence of the workforce. “[In] such a small industry, there’s plenty of work to go around, so there’s no need to be that competitive,” Seda says. Vasaturo describes collaboration at higher levels of the industry. “Everybody knows everybody,” he says of the terminal companies and managers. To Vasaturo, the amicability comes from a shared desire to make the Port as 18
regionally competitive and productive as possible. Dredging and other infrastructure projects, regardless of how they affect workers, may keep the port relevant as trade patterns change. Of the three ports in Connecticut –– New Haven, New London, and Bridgeport –– New Haven is the only one that is neither diminutive nor in a state of decline. The inconsistency and infrastructure requirements of the shipping industry have taken a toll. “There used to be a stevedoring terminal in Bridgeport,” Vasaturo tells me frankly, “but it’s not open for stevedoring anymore.” New Haven has seen some trouble, too. NHT went bankrupt in 1994, and subsequently abandoned dry cargo shipping. “When we came out of bankruptcy in 1996, we looked at the best way for our company to rebuild, and it was to lease out and not be the operator of the cargo business,” Vasaturo says. Matthews, the Port Authority Director, hopes to strengthen New Haven’s dry cargo business, and in the process reduce the number of trucks leaving the Port of New York and crowding the I-95 on their way to Connecticut. The Port Authority is currently battling the Connecticut Department of Transportation over some parcels of land on the Port grounds, and if they win this extra space, he may want to add specialized terminals to handle contain-
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ers. Processing these huge metal boxes relies heavily on automation, which Matthews sees as essential. “I would say it definitely absolutely has to occur,” he tells me, “because the rest of the world is automating its terminals.” In an automated port, “instead of being out driving equipment,” Matthews explains, “you’re sitting in front of a computer screen and you’re operating three cranes at once as opposed to one.” What happens to the other two crane operators is unclear. Perhaps understandably, then, he’s faced opposition from the ILA, which has an active branch at the Port of New London. “The major frustration in the United States,” he says with audible irritation, “is that the ILA and the unions refuse to modernize, and all their competing ports across the world are modernizing.” Matthews’ duty as Port Authority Director is to keep New Haven, and the other Connecticut ports, competitive as the industry transforms. More ships hopefully mean more frequent employment. But at the administrative level, the lines connecting prosperity for the Port to prosperity for the workers have yet to be drawn. When I ask Seda if he thinks the Port has a bright future, he seems mildly amused, and ponders for a moment. “I think so,” he replies. “I think compared to places like Bridgeport, it’s better off.” He believes its survival doesn’t depend on dredging or other improvements. Without these changes, he assumes “it’ll kind of just stay the same,” with 19 APRIL 2018
enough work to do and enough jobs to go around. This work’s dispersal in two-week intervals may just be the way it is, an inevitable condition of the shipping industry in New Haven. That said, Seda’s stakes in the matter have changed. Since leaving Gateway, he’s been working for the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection as a research vessel captain. Vasaturo doesn’t discuss dredging in terms of labor, but instead imagines the Port becoming, bigger, more profitable, more like New York. “It’s going to give more opportunities,” he says. Anticipation aside, he doesn’t seem concerned about the Port’s present state. “It’s a fun industry,” he tells me, as we stand at his office window. Vasaturo points down to a small shed in the terminal yard. “That little white building is where our hourly workers congregate, and their time cards are in there, so I can really see everything from here,” he says. Mixed with the whirr of machinery and beeps of trucks in reverse, rock music floats in through the glass.
— Dimitri Diagne is a senior
in Berkely College
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MULTIPLE
CHOICE
What is the future of education in New Haven? With the city up in “Y arms, three schools may hold the answer.
written by Mark Rosenberg
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Sebastian Quiñonez, a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College, graduated from Amistad High School in 2016. He says the charter school’s rigorous approach has both benefits and downsides.
photo by Vivek Suri
COVER
Pointing Fingers
ou’re about to get sued,” New Haven Board of Education member Darnell Goldson warned, swiveling his chair to the right and pointing at Ed Joyner, the Board’s President. Joyner stood, microphone in hand, as the crowd of community members packing the auditorium of Beecher School looked on. He turned towards Goldson and leaned forward, his gold tie swinging to and fro, until their faces were a foot apart. “You know what? We can go to Bowen Field,” Joyner bellowed, referring to a local high school’s football field, “and have a duel. Oh, you scared? You scared?” He looked back towards the crowd: “I move to adjourn the meeting.” With that, New Haven’s school system entered a new, uncertain era. On that evening last November, the Board had convened to appoint the district’s next superintendent. It was the culmination of a yearlong search process that, at times, threatened to split the city apart. Two candidates remained: Pamela Brown, Chief of Elementary Schools in Fontana, CA, and Carol Birks, the Hartford Public Schools superintendent’s chief of staff. New Haven Mayor Toni Harp, who serves on the Board, supported Birks, as did her three appointees; the other three Board members backed Brown. A week after the finalists were announced, sixty parents, teachers, and other residents signed a petition urging the Board not to hire Birks. A couple days later, before the meeting at Beecher School, organizers taped sheets of paper around the auditorium, listing a thousand names: an expanded petition against her. During the meeting, parents and students stood in solemn protest at the back of the auditorium, duct tape covering their mouths. At one point, when Goldson, a Birks supporter, began to defend THE NEW JOUR NAL
his vote, the crowd broke into a chant: “Shame on you!” Despite the outcry, the vote went as expected: three votes for Brown, four for Birks. With the Board’s decision made, Birks started work this March. What created such animus towards Birks? The answer, in part, has to do with charter schools. Unlike traditional public schools, which typically operate under the local Board of Education and follow state education laws, charter schools are operated by independent organizations that craft their own “charters,” or sets of standards; the charter must be renewed periodically by the local or state Board. While both traditional public schools and charter schools are publicly funded, charter schools can set their own curricula. Proponents argue that charter schools provide the flexibility to promote much-needed experimentation in the classroom. Skeptics view them as a threat to public school systems, contending that they encroach upon funding streams, weaken teachers’ unions, and elude accountability to local government. Some advocates of traditional public schools fear that charter schools’ end goal is to compete –– rather than collaborate –– with established school systems. At a community forum in November, Birks expressed the most openness towards charter schools of the three final candidates. She argued for a collaborative approach, telling the audience, “We shouldn’t fight charter schools; we should learn from them.” A story in the New Haven Independent that highlighted the comment further damaged Birks’ reputation. She had already been scrutinized for her past employment at two for-profit education consulting firms and her membership of a charter school board in Hartford, according to Carlos Torre, who sat on the New Haven Board of Education for more than twenty-two of the past twenty-four years until his term ended this January, and voted against Birks. (Birks could not be reached for comment.) More broadly, detractors feared that Birks wouldn’t relate well to New Haven’s students. She had only three years of teaching experience, and stepped down after one year as principal of Harding High School in Bridgeport as the school struggled with poor test scores and high sus-
pension rates, then took a job with Global Partnership Schools, the management firm hired to turn the school around. On that November night at Beecher School, Jacob Spell and Makayla Dawkins, the Board’s two non-voting student representatives, presented a list of eight hundred signatures, collected from students at Hillhouse, Career, and Co-Op high schools, all in opposition to Birks. As the Board’s discussion devolved into jeers and interruptions, Spell and Dawkins stood up from the table and left. They, like the student protesters in the back of the auditorium, had their mouths effectively taped shut. “It seemed so disempowering,” said Sarah Miller, a local education advocate whose two children attend New Haven public schools. “You bring in these candidates, you ask kids what they want, and then you ignore them.” Now, New Haven’s schools are at a crossroads. What role will charter schools will play in the district, and what does their approach mean for students? Along with the sixty public schools run by the district, the city has seven charter schools that enroll 2,500 students –– close to 10 percent of the district’s total student population. Three of New Haven’s most innovative schools –– two charter schools, Achievement First Amistad High School and Common Ground High School, and one magnet school, Metropolitan Business Academy –– are, in essence, playing tug-of-war with the district’s future. If one of the supposed benefits of charter schools is that they enable experimentation, this raises the question: What does educational innovation look like in practice? What are the benefits and pitfalls of granting schools individual autonomy? And is this same kind of innovation possible outside of charter schools? At the heart of these questions lie the district’s students: their future depends on the answers.
Climbing the Mountain
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very morning in high school, Arese Uwuoruya and Sebastian Quiñonez got up at 6 a.m. and put on their uniforms: a white or light blue button down, khakis, a tie for Quiñonez. They walked into a building whose exterior –– white and light-blue tiles above khaki-colored stones –– matched their outfits, topped by a frieze depicting Black luminaries: Marian Wright Edelman, Maya Angelou, Thurgood Marshall. They went to Advisory –– similar to homeroom –– at the start and end of each day.
As the Board’s discussion devolved into jeers and interruptions, Spell and Dawkins stood up from the table and left. They, like the student protestors in the back of the auditorium, had their mouths effectively taped shut.
At the heart of these questions lie the district’s students: their future depends on the answers. At Advisory on Thursday afternoons, Uwuoruya and Quiñonez received “paychecks”: scorecards documenting their behavior for the week. Merits were awarded for positive contributions to class: an insightful comment, a demonstration of creative thinking. Demerits were doled out for distracting or disrespectful behavior. On the paycheck, points were added and subtracted from a base mark of one hundred. A well-behaved student might score close to two hundred, earning the privilege of attending school out of uniform that Friday. A disobedient student might receive a much lower score (say, –4) and would have to come to school in blue and khaki as usual. Uwuoruya and Quiñonez attended Achievement First Amistad High School, a charter school located on Dixwell Avenue, before graduating in 2016. (Now, they are both sophomores at Yale). Achievement First is a “charter management organization,” or CMO: an umbrella nonprofit, operating a network of thirty-four charter schools. It runs five of the seven charter schools in New Haven, enrolling a total of just over two thousand students. Every five years, the state Board of Education reviews and reauthorizes these schools. At a typical Achievement First school, over 98 percent of students are Black or Latinx, and over three-quarters qualify for free or reduced lunch. The organization’s name is a proxy for its philosophy. Achievement is the guiding tenet of each school, and data the prism through which accomplishment is assessed and interpreted. “Behind every data point is a student, a family, a teacher,” the organization’s website reads. At Achievement First schools, teachers meet weekly with a “coach,” typically their department’s dean, to review their lessons. These meetings revolve around metrics. “The data is what drives the decisions for kids,” said Fatimah Barker, Achievement First’s Chief External Officer, who has worked with the network as a teacher, principal, and administrator for over a decade. “Seventy to eighty percent of the coaching meeting is about data.” Teachers administer standardized weekly quizzes to students at all thirty-four schools through a system called the Student Work Protocol, and students complete one- or two-question “exit tickets” at the end of each class, providing the scores that fuel this achievement-based approach. At Achievement First’s high schools, this rigor extends to the college application process. In all four grades, students take a college-prep course, setting long-term goals, learning to write a college essay, and preparing for interviews. Teachers guide students through the Common Application and help low-income students with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). This sup 23 APRIL 2018
port continues beyond each day’s final bell. When Uwuoruya attended Amistad, the school provided brownies and chicken wings at after-school study sessions. Two years later, she still receives emails from a guidance counselor at Amistad about fellowships and job opportunities. Every year, the college acceptance rate for graduating Amistad seniors is 100 percent. Amistad’s academic approach –– the emphasis on data in teacher evaluations, the curricular coordination across dozens of schools, the institutionalized support throughout the college process –– is enabled by its status as a charter school. Since teachers at charter schools aren’t union members, Amistad can create its own evaluation system. And Amistad has the autonomy to establish its own curriculum, driven by data and devoted to preparing students for college. Amistad’s charter school status provides other advantages that may artificially bolster the school’s stellar scores. Though students are admitted through a blind lottery, Amistad doesn’t accept transfer students after October 1 –– so, for instance, when the district admitted 250 Puerto Rican students displaced by Hurricane Maria last fall, most of whom require additional language support, they all entered non-charter public schools, according to Jason Bartlett, Mayor Harp’s Liaison to the Board of Education. The hallways at Amistad are lined with banners emblazoned with inspirational slogans: “We have the hardest working students in Connecticut” and “We need to climb the mountain to college.” That second banner, to Quiñonez, was symbolic of a lifelong journey. His family immigrated to the United States from Ecuador when he was five years old; to support his parents, he often works at their restaurant, New Haven Salad Shop. Quiñonez felt he benefited from his time at Amistad. But to him, the merit system was oppressive; time and time again, he got demerits for dropping his pencil in class. “The merit system can easily be distorted or hybridized into a paternal disciplinary action,” he said. “Everybody hates the culture it creates. That’s why people are like, you’re going back to hell, you’re going back to jail.” Quiñonez said that although he was a straight-A student, he got two weeks of detention within the first month nearly every year at Amistad, forcing him to miss soccer practices and games. He was often pulled out of his classes for disciplinary proceedings. 23 THE NEW JOUR NAL
“We wanted to create what we called ‘incubators of innovation.’”
The system permeated the school’s atmosphere. “It created this weird culture of silence where we wouldn’t say anything in class to avoid getting demerits at the end of the week, rather than speaking up and becoming one of the kids the teachers had their eye on,” Uwuoruya said. “It felt ridiculous the way some kids were policed.” In May 2016, during Uwuoruya and Quiñonez’s last semester, frustration with the system bubbled over as hundreds of Amistad students staged a schoolwide walkout to protest what they deemed a culture of racial insensitivity and a lack of faculty diversity. Amistad responded by increasing recruitment of faculty of color and using internal surveys to ensure that faculty of color felt happy and supported. Asked whether the walkout led to changes in the merit system, administrators demurred. “The way we handle school culture, it’s not discipline on an island, it’s all the stuff that goes into making a school strong,” said Amanda Pinto, Achievement First’s Director of Communications. “That’s something that’s always evolving and changing.” Like its curriculum, Amistad’s discipline system might only be possible to enact in a charter school. In the school year that followed the walkout, 25.5 percent of students at the three Amistad Academy schools received at least one in-school or out-of-school suspension, compared to 6.9 percent of students in New Haven’s traditional public schools. The merit system is shifting. Thirty-eight percent of the faculty at Achievement First’s five New Haven schools are Black, Latinx, or multi-racial, and suspension rates have declined more than fifty percent in the last two years. Still, without intervention by the district, it took student outcry to change this culture. Many of Connecticut’s charter schools are standalone institutions. But Amistad, as one member of a larger, CMO-operated network, exerts a different kind of influence on New Haven’s public school system. Since the network’s first school was founded in 1999, Achievement First has expanded rapidly. To Mark Waxenberg, a former President of the Connecticut Educators’ Association, the state’s largest teacher’s union, who helped write Connectictut’s charter school law in 1996, this expansion of charter school networks poses a threat to traditional public
schools. Charter management organizations are “trying to create a private system,” he alleged, “but have the public pay for it.” In December 2014, six thousand people clad in neon shirts that read “For Every Child” flooded the New Haven Green. The rally, emceed by Ben Cruse, the principal of a Hartford Achievement First school, was organized by ConnCAN, a pro-charter lobbying organization. Speakers urged the state to help the forty thousand students “trapped” in its “failing schools.” The rally kicked off an ad campaign by Families for Excellent Schools (FES), a New York-based pro-charter lobbying organization that shut down in February. In one commercial, a series of students stare into the camera, praising their schools, before the screen cuts to black. “Forty thousand Connecticut students would answer very differently,” the narrator reads, “trapped in schools where they don’t learn to read, write, or do math at grade level.” The ad cuts to a shot of a girl holding her mother’s hand, staring nervously up at the camera behind a set of iron bars. The rally and ensuing campaign stoked fears among traditional public school advocates that charter school networks like Achievement First, with the backing of groups like ConnCAN, sought to create an alternative school system that would drive public schools out of existence. Today, Achievement First administrators deny this intent. “In my ideal world, we would be hand-in-hand with traditional public schools,” said Barker, the Chief External Officer, noting Achievement First’s open source curriculum and its incubator program for aspiring public school administrators as two efforts to collaborate outside of the organization’s network. “There’s a ton of myths getting in the way of our partnership, thinking that we are here as a threat when we’re just here to serve communities that have been historically underserved.” But to Waxenberg, charter school networks like Achievement First, with dozens of schools across the Northeast, have fundamentally deviated from the intent of the original Connecticut charter school law he helped write. “We wanted to create what we called ‘incubators of innovation,’” he said. “It was really to create a laboratory … within the public school structure to use to help reform public education across the state.” He feels that charter management organizations like Achievement First compete with traditional public schools in Connecticut, and have shared their ideas only after forceful prodding. After Connecticut’s charter law was established in
1997, a dozen charter schools opened their doors across the state. One of those, Common Ground High School, still runs in New Haven today. Unlike Amistad, which is part of the Achievement First network, it’s an independent, standalone school. And while it, too, challenges established models of learning, it’s pushing students in a very different direction: outdoors, and into their community.
An Uncommon Curriculum
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kieleh Zidbeck and Brian Chantre are designing a skyscraper. They envision a towering white structure with countless Chlorophytum comosa, or spider plants, hanging off, their long, thin leaves sticking out every which way. Passersby will be able to pluck a plant right off and take it with them. “Then,” Zidbeck explains, “the whole world will know the benefit of spider plants.” Right now, all Zidbeck and Chantre have is a tiny C. comosum in a white Chobani cup, but it’s the germ of a much larger idea. The pair are students in a course at Common Ground High School called the Senior Social Justice Experience. Zidbeck, who wears silver, undulating snake earrings and a wide smile, became interested in architecture after she took a course in sustainable design. The spider plants address an issue that’s affected her own life. “I grew up in a low-income community,” she explained. “A lot of kids had respiratory issues. These plants absorb particulates like xylene formaldehyde” — a toxin linked to upper respiratory tract infections. Zidbeck and Chantre have been spending hours in the school’s woodshop, finishing up a planter with three wooden bins for the C. comosa, to be placed in the hallway of one of Common Ground’s school buildings. The bins are tiered like a staircase, gesturing up towards something bigger. Founded in 1997 by the New Haven Ecology Project as a place to promote environmental education, Common Ground and its two hundred students are bounded by a small farm at the base of the property and enclosures for chickens and goats just up the hill. The school emphasizes community engagement through programs like Environmental Ventures, in which students develop entrepreneurial projects and pocket the profits, and Green Jobs Corps, which offers low-income students jobs at the school’s farm and other community organizations.
Common Ground’s courses are often unconventional. One former course, “Egg and Seed,” examined the beginning of life cycles in both literature and science. As with Achievement First, the autonomy Common Ground has as a charter school allows for an outside-the-box curriculum. And its interdisciplinary focus on the outdoors is possible only because the school was founded by an environmental nonprofit with both a radical vision for education and twenty acres abutting a state park. Maintaining this curricular creativity without compromising students’ test scores presented the school with a challenge. Back in 2007, just 30 percent of the school’s students earned proficient scores in English on CAP, the state’s benchmark test at the time. The school responded by implementing a variety of metrics, such as Common Core standards, monthly checks on class performance, and an in-house reading, language, and math assessment called MAP. By 2014, ninety percent of students met CAP proficiency levels. But this shift in focus towards college achievement compromised the school’s founding principles of interdisciplinary coursework and outdoor programming. “It’s always been a tension for any school that’s small and independent,” said Liz Cox, Common Ground’s School Director. “You’re translating your transcript for a college, they see a class called ‘Egg and Seed’ and go, ‘What the heck is that?’ But we were losing a sense of our site-based classes, which were what this place really was about … We wanted to make sure kids felt connected to the place and to the city and saw themselves as leaders capable of change.” Administrators introduced a set of environmental leadership standards called POWER to form a new foundation for classes. Now, Common Ground students follow a carefully curated four-year progression. Ninth graders focus on the school’s site, tenth grade courses emphasize community engagement, and eleventh and twelfth graders follow a more individualized path. The Senior Social Justice Experience course is the culmination: students complete a project like Zidbeck and Chantre’s planter and compile a portfolio of their time at Common Ground. Being a charter school facilitated Common Ground’s transformation, Cox said. “This year, to move this new curriculum out, to offer these kinds of choice-rich offerings, we completely changed our schedule, our school
“Everybody hates the culture it creates. That’s why people are like, you’re going back to hell, you’re going back to jail.” 25
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day, the bell schedule, everything, and we did that with all of our teachers over the course of three months,” Cox said. “I think in a traditional school system, that never would have happened.” At charters like Common Ground and Achievement First, this kind of experimentation can be enacted and implemented immediately. Unlike Achievement First, Common Ground has a peaceful relationship with the local school district, according to Torre, the former Board of Education member. This is partly because, as an independent school, Common Ground is not seen as a threat to non-charters. But it’s also because it opens its resources to traditional public schools, hosting five thousand students for field trips every year. Still, Cox is skeptical that Common Ground’s approach to education could be replicated outside of a charter school setting. “All charters here are mission-driven,” she said. “Magnet schools, I look at them more as themed schools. Our mission is in our bones. It’s infiltrating everything that we do.” As Cox notes, the assumption has long held that for traditional public schools, experimentation is much more difficult. But one public school in New Haven has broken from conventional pedagogy, challenging the notion that a school without a charter is a school without a mission.
Working From Within
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eslie Blatteau’s senior seminar was abuzz one morning this April. Students sat clustered around six rectangular tables, chatting as they waited for the lesson to begin. Blatteau strode to the front of the room, all business in a white polka-dot button-down and black high-top sneakers. “Welcome. We’re going to get started.” Two students in the front row sat on their phones, texting. “Folks, I need your focus this morning,” she said, addressing the room at large. At another point, two students in the back chatted away. “Zach and Victoria, one mic, please,” she said firmly. After running through a rubric on introductory paragraphs, she passed a sticky note to each student. “Tell me what you need,” she said, “and tell me what you’re straight with.” Then, the students fanned out to the Dell computers lining the periphery of the room and sprang into action. Each was working on a six- to eight-page research paper on an international human rights issue. Blatteau teaches a senior seminar on law and political
science at Metropolitan Business Academy (MBA), a magnet school located just south of Wooster Square. While traditional public schools in New Haven only admit students from the immediate city, magnet schools also admit students from surrounding suburban districts via lottery. With twenty such schools, New Haven has the largest magnet system in the state. But unlike charter schools, magnet schools are governed by state education standards and held accountable to New Haven’s Board of Education, meaning that they face the same curricular restraints as traditional public schools. MBA, though, is different. Classes here, in contrast to the vast majority of New Haven’s schools, are not sorted by academic ability. Judy Puglisi, the school’s principal, said she views the practice of tracking based on perceived ability level as the product of bias. “Often, children who are viewed to have negative character traits don’t get tracked appropriately due to adult biases,” she wrote in an email. “If a kid has to babysit and doesn’t have time for homework after school, this child may be assigned to a lower track. The positive aspects of a non-tracked room include bringing diversity of thought into the room, challenging stereotypes and biases, and improving instructional pedagogy.” One student in Blatteau’s course had transferred from New Horizons School, a transition school for at-risk students, at the start of that year, and was writing his first-ever research paper for the course. He had chosen to research child exploitation at United States-operated factories in Sierra Leone. At MBA, students receive traditional grades, but most of the emphasis is on process; teachers provide extensive feedback emphasizing revision and long-term improvement. The research paper Blatteau’s students are working on will culminate in a social justice symposium in May, where they will present their findings to an audience of parents and community members. “Even if the outcome isn’t an exemplary paper, the student’s identity changes as a result of going through this process of researching and writing,” Blatteau said. “The student has internalized
When New Haven’s 25,000 students sit down at their desks, the education they get in each of the city’s sixty-seven schools is a product of both policies and priorities. 26
THE NEW JOURN AL
what it takes to write a research paper; they see themselves as a social scientist.” Eighty-five percent of MBA’s students are of color and its faculty is almost all white, making the racial dynamics of the classroom a focus for teachers. “Teenagers naturally question authority figures because their sense of justice and their sense of right and wrong is on overdrive,” Blatteau said. “We try as majority-white teachers in this school to not see outspoken black and brown teenagers as a threat to us, but as people who are trying to make the world a better place.” MBA is a “trauma-informed school,” providing intensive clinical support and counseling for students based on their individual needs. Puglisi, noting that students who exhibited behavioral issues were often dealing with outside stressors, started a weekly after-school drama club for students with high rates of absence. She then helped develop a course called “Alive,” taught by a history teacher and a trauma clinician, that engages with social justice issues, much like Common Ground’s senior seminar. Now, a team of a social worker, six social work interns, and two trauma specialists hold weekly case management meetings and develop plans to help individual students. MBA’s approach –– project-based, non-tracked, trauma-informed –– is the product of over a decades’ work. Blatteau and Puglisi met at Connecticut Scholars, a now-defunct New Haven school for ninth and tenth graders, in 2007, where they began to develop the approaches that now inform MBA’s core philosophy. “This common vision has been systematized and integrated into all aspects of the school community,” Puglisi wrote, including scheduling, allocating funding, supporting students, tracking academic progress, promoting student leadership, and hiring staff. There’s a reason few public schools look like this: it’s extremely difficult to do. But Blatteau and Puglisi’s work is a testament that while innovation may be more difficult to implement at a school like MBA than at a charter school like Amistad or Common Ground, it’s abundantly possible.
The problem of priorities forces teachers and administrators to ask more abstract questions, about ideals and values. Given a school’s limited funding, will it invest in computers or art classes? When a student speaks out of turn in class, will the teacher scold or engage? Faced with a critique of her pedagogy, will a principal look to another school for advice or turn the other way? These questions define the kind of community a school creates and inform the way its students grow and learn to see the world. This April, two of the students in Blatteau’s law and political science seminar at MBA, Damyia Jackson and Nyshiah Simon, described a project they had recently completed. Last fall, Blatteau’s students curated exhibits on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and installed a museum in the school. On December 10, Human Rights Day, the museum was opened to the public. Jackson and Simon are best friends, practically inseparable, and they kept jumping in over each other as they talked about the project. Jackson’s project was on women’s rights, a topic she’d wanted to study since the start of the year. “We got to say how we felt,” she said, “using facts.” To Simon, that’s true of Blatteau’s class as a whole. “We get to speak our word,” she said. Now that her tenure has begun, the way Carol Birks chooses to lead will have profound implications for the district. Will she be a tacit supporter of charter schools, or an outspoken advocate? Will she engage with traditional public schools, or will she retreat into boardrooms? These things matter, but one concern overshadows all others. In the search for New Haven’s superintendent last fall, students felt disregarded and disempowered. But in the classroom, teachers and administrators have the opportunity to change that going forward –– to create a place for students to speak their word. There are many means to this end, in charter, magnet, and traditional public schools alike. As New Haven’s schools turn to the future, with Birks at the helm, the fundamental question facing the district is whether its students will be silenced –– or whether they’ll be able to speak.
Unanswered Questions
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hen New Haven’s twenty-five thousand students sit down at their desks, the education they get in each of the city’s sixty-seven schools is a product of both policies and priorities. The former component, policies, raises concrete questions (“closeended,” a teacher might say). Would a charter school be able to keep up its test scores if it had to accept transfer students midyear? Doubtful. Could a traditional public school overhaul its curriculum at the drop of a hat? Probably not. Can a magnet school eliminate tracked courses and ignore standardized testing, throwing conventional pedagogy to the winds? Yes, but it’s hard to pull off. 27 APRIL 2018
— Mark Rosenberg is a sophomore in Pierson College. He is an editor-in-chief of The New Journal.
27 THE NEW JOUR NAL
poem
ANATOMY OF OBSERVATION Fernando Rojas
Open up your coffers and caress air Rugged waters and minerals leap to grasp peach skies Remember the geometry of birds was never meant to appeal to you. You, small observer, trust these blissful aromas. Unfold the machinery of your heart. Cosmic stories are written into the spaces you’ve forgotten to fill. Below the jade currents are golden silts. Follow full and follow slowly. You, ocean of a man, lower your tide and see how the sand around you dries. Expose anchors of shipwrecks and yearn in the melancholy of their perhaps. Soon you’ll see than holding on relentlessly erodes.
illustration by meher hans
— Fernando Rojas is a junior in Ezra Stiles College.
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F E AT U R E
PANGAEA’S EDGE Christine Xu
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t the summit of East Rock Park in New Haven, Connecticut, marked by the Sailors and Soldiers war monument, the view extends for miles and miles –– across tall green trees, over downtown buildings that look like miniatures from a distance, and all the way to the blue waters of New Haven Harbor. Turn back the clock 200 million years, and this view is completely different. The land is covered with marshy shores and turquoise lakes and steaming volcanoes. A twenty-foot-tall crested Dilophosaurus prowls in search of prey, leaving three-toed footprints. North America, Africa, and South America are joined together as the supercontinent Pangaea. Walking across Connecticut, the dinosaur might step into what is now Rhode Island –– or southern Morocco. About 175 million years ago, as Pangaea broke 30
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illustration Julia Hedges
New Haven sits on the birth scars of the Atlantic Ocean. The rocks here tell the story of its human history. Reporting for this piece was made possible by the Ed Bennett Memorial Fund.
apart, the continental plates spread and allowed magma to emerge from deep within the Earth. Lava flows, volcanic eruptions, and glacial events continued to shape the landscape –– molding Connecticut by fire and ice. From the top of East Rock today, these dramatic events are hardly apparent. Visitors to East Rock and West Rock, the rocky ridges that flank New Haven, or Sleeping Giant mountain in neighboring Hamden only see a stable landscape covered in greenery. Hikers are likely unaware that these parks once stood at the borders between continents, or that they’re tracing the footsteps of prehistoric dinosaurs. Though the community relies on the parks as local hubs of exercise and leisure, most people know very little about the stories of these landmarks –– stories that have shaped the human history of Connecticut for centuries. 31 APRIL 2018
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F
or geologists, East Rock and West Rock aren’t weekend hangout spots –– they’re ground zero in a dramatic story about how the earth under our feet has shifted ever since the planet first formed. Geologists investigate how continental collisions and lava flows shaped the landscape of Connecticut, uniquely positioned at the fault lines of Pangaea. To understand why Connecticut’s landmarks fascinate geologists, I met with Professor Charles Merguerian from Hofstra University, a leading expert on geologic structure and plate tectonics in Connecticut and New York. He had come to New Haven to visit the Yale Peabody Museum’s geology collection, and asked me to meet him there. Dressed in jeans and hiking boots, Merguerian showed me his collection of rocks in the back rooms of the museum, stored from his graduate school research projects. “Geologists are like detectives,” he told me as he opened a drawer, revealing tagged slabs of rocks about the size of my palm. The rocks seem unremarkable at first glance –– they’re what Merguerian calls “ugly rocks,” chunks that can be seen at the side of any road –– but these are often extremely valuable to scientists. These rocks, which Merguerian collected from construction sites around Connecticut and New York, carry the record of geologic events that occurred in New England hundreds of millions of years ago.
Lava flows, volcanic eruptions, and glacial events continued to shape the landscape — literally molding Connecticut by fire and ice.
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In his research, Merguerian uses a special saw blade to cut the rocks into paper-thin slices. He analyzes the slices to figure out what minerals are present. “These minerals…tell you how deep the rocks were, how old they were, under what temperatures and pressures they formed,” he explained. Since certain minerals can only form at precise temperatures, pressures, and locations, he uses this information to piece together the story of continental-scale collisions and breakages that shaped Connecticut. As Merguerian recounted to me, Connecticut’s story began as Pangaea formed. Around 450 million years ago, the continental plates began to crash together to form Pangaea. North America and Africa collided in an event called the Taconic Orogeny, where the earth’s crust wrinkled, building mountain ranges that make up the present-day Appalachians. Then, 275 million years later, Pangaea started to break apart. Magma seeped out from the crust as gaps between the plates opened up. The peeling apart of the North American and African continents created the Hartford Basin, the jagged rift basin spanning across Connecticut and Massachusetts today. “[The basin] marked the fracturing of the edge of North America, when Africa as a continental landmass started to spread away from North America,” explained Merguerian. Around this time, Merguerian said, the coastline would have resembled what the East African Rift looks like today, a massive trench running across the continent. East Rock, West Rock, and Sleeping Giant all formed 175 million years ago when Pangaea broke apart. Magma cooled underground and was pushed to the surface by continental movement to expose igneous rock. In the following hundreds of millions of years, these rocks were shaped into
their present form. The rocks contain mainly diabase and basalt with a high iron content, explaining the dark brownish-reddish color. The stair-like appearance of these ridges led to their technical name, “trap rock” ridges, from the Swedish word “trappsteg,” meaning “stair.” Like these landmarks, most of the rocks New Haven residents see and walk on today all came from deep within the earth. “The surface of rock that you drive on and look at in Connecticut, along the highways and walking through the wood –– [the] bedrock that’s now exposed to the surface –– was exhumed from depths of at least twenty to twenty-five miles beneath the earth’s surface today,” said Merguerian. Finally, starting around two hundred thousand years ago, a series of glaciers added the finishing touches to our modern landscape, sprinkling boulders across the land and remodeling the Connecticut River Valley. These events –– from the formation and breakage of Pangaea to the most recent glaciation –– shaped the environment where we walk and live and breathe every day. Merguerian feels that his scientific understanding of the area allows a deeper connection with the landscape. “There are people that like to drive cars without knowing anything about how the cars work,” he said. “Others take great pleasures in knowing the inner mechanical secrets of how cars work, because it enhances the driving experience. Same thing with the earth’s surface.”
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ut the story of Connecticut is incomplete as only a geologic tale. As humans became a part of the landscape, they too began to shape it. To understand the role of humans in Connecticut’s natural history, I met with Julie Hulten, the community outreach chair at Sleeping Giant State Park. We spoke in the History Room at the Hamden Library, which was filled with documents, pictures, and models that showed what the town looked like throughout the ages. She sifted through black-and-white photos of Sleeping Giant, with families posing proudly in front of cabins on its rocky head. Ten years ago, Hulten, a Hamden resident and former teacher, started regularly hiking Sleeping Giant and decided to help with its preservation. She now both contributes to the upkeep of the park and the documentation of its history. Hulten picked up the story of the landscape for me, now on a human, rather than geologic, timescale. The Quinnipiac nation, which has inhabited
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this part of New England from long before European contact, has a legend explaining how Sleeping Giant was formed. The Quinnipiac tell stories of the giant Hobbomock, a powerful spirit who had taught all people and animals to speak the same language. When they drifted apart and lost this ability, he was enraged. He started ripping up trees, and, with one stomp of his foot, created a bend in the course of the Connecticut River. In order to stop Hobbomock from wreaking havoc on the landscape, his brother Keitan cast a spell on him to get him to fall asleep. Hobbomock has yet to wake up today. For the Quinnipiac, the place exists as a living, breathing part of the Earth. When British colonists arrived in Connecticut, they settled around trap rock ridges like East Rock, West Rock, and Sleeping Giant, where they found rich construction materials like brownstone for their houses and churches. As the tale goes, in the 1660s, several judges had sentenced King Charles I to death during the English Civil War, and sought refuge in the New Haven wilderness. They hid in a cave now called Judges Cave in West Rock, and spent several months there until being chased out by a mountain lion. Society’s relationship with the landscape began to change with industrialization in the 1800s, when for the first time, interested naturegoers had to actively seek out natural spaces. As the transcendentalist movement took hold, more people grew interested in nature as a respite from industrial daily life. East Rock and Sleeping Giant became popular tourist destinations. The wealthy of New Haven and Hamden built cabins along the ridges of Sleeping Giant and would stay there during the summers. A local named John Dickerman constructed a carriage road and a pavilion on one of the ridges, and held an ice cream social to celebrate its completion; such projects ushered in a new age of outdoor recreation. At the same time, these natural spaces were not outside the influences of industrialization. In 1911, the Mount Carmel Traprock Company began to quarry the Giant’s “head” for its valuable building materials. Successive companies joined in on the quarrying as America developed its love for the automobile, and years of blasting and stone removal left deep scars on the Giant’s head. Locals complained about the noise and worried that quarrying might destroy the landscape. In 1924, under the leadership of Yale professor James Toumey, citizens formed Sleeping Giant Parks Association 33 THE NEW JOUR NAL
to manage a donation of two hundred acres from a local landowner. In a remarkable environmentalist community effort, they turned the land over to the state for the creation of Sleeping Giant State Park. This effort might have gone even further, as local residents had long played around with the idea to create a park spanning from New Haven to Hamden. The park would have joined East Rock and extended all the way up north to Sleeping Giant, but residential and commercial interests prevented this effort. While Hulten would have appreciated having such vast space set aside for nature, she laughed and admitted that if the plans were completed, her house wouldn’t be there today. Parks like East Rock and Sleeping Giant continue to play an important role in the community, from organized hikes to outdoor classrooms. In the summer, students toss Frisbees at the East Rock summit; in the winter, when the ground is covered in snow, some Special Olympics participants have used the flat open spaces around Sleeping Giant for ski training. “It’s a place for recreation and re-creation,” said Hulten. “Any folks will say that’s my sanctuary –– that’s where I go to clear my head. We all need natural places, away from noises and people.” Robert Thorson is a professor at the University of Connecticut who describes his work as “cultural geology.” He studies how humans might impact the natural landscape’s future, and educates the public about their stake in the environment. “When you take someone outside in a real setting, away from a desktop and away from a classroom and away from a laboratory, when you take them into some place they could have been a hundred thousand years ago, I think they feel differently about it…there’s a Paleolithic sort of power at
heart.” Thorson thinks that at the end of the day, people are inspired by this same feeling when they encounter geological features, whether hiker or geologist. “Geologists are in the field because there’s this visceral sense of being outdoors somewhere looking at something,” he said. “Even if they spend ninety percent of their time in the lab sorting microfossils, they’re still really interested in the place. It’s the lakes, the river valley, the up-faulted block that interests people.”
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hile we use these natural spaces to “get away” from society, it’s impossible not to bring human influences with us into these environments. Thorson advocates for greater public awareness of natural history, so that Connecticut residents can make informed decisions about the future based on the past. Thorson believes that humans hold the power to bring about great positive or negative impacts on the landscape. Columbia researcher Peter LeTourneau describes parks like East Rock, West Rock, and Sleeping Giant as valuable “sky islands,” contained ecological areas in a largely urban landscape. Thorson laments how the increased urbanization of Connecticut threatens these spaces. In a shift to what he calls “exit-ramp culture,” cities and roads have cut across the landscape, replacing birches and pines with gas stations and highways. He wants more places like East Rock, West Rock, and Sleeping Giant, which serve as refuges both for people who seek nature, and for nature itself. In the effort to protect our natural spaces, Thorson thinks that geologists play a key role in understanding the human impact on the environment. “I think the most important thing is to evaluate the ways in which human beings in the last four hundred years have modified the landscape,” said Thorson. “It’s only fair to talk about human beings as geologic agents.” While human beings have only appeared for a sliver of a second on the geological clock,
In a shift to what he calls “exit-ramp culture,” cities and roads have cut across the landscape, replacing birches and pines with gas stations and highways. they’ve modified the landscape with impunity, from the quarrying of the colonists to the ambitious construction projects taking place today. Merguerian offers a slightly different perspective. He’s contributed to the construction of highways and subway tunnels, for instance, by researching rock types suitable for drilling. His work represents a source of contention among geologists, who have often felt conflicted about their knowledge being used for development rather than preservation. Merguerian thinks such a conflict is unnecessary. He believes we should continue using our natural resources, while developing judicious ways to make use of our environment without exhausting it. When he helped with the construction of the Queens Tunnel in New York, he thought, ‘Why not just leave the rocks instead of paving them over with concrete, so people can appreciate their natural beauty?’ His idea was dismissed, but he hopes that more people can understand that the relationship between humans and the environment is not an issue of two extremes, but rather of compromise.
I
n his writings, Thorson references a quote from Thoreau: “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book to be studied by geologists and antiquarians chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit –– not a fossil earth, but a living earth.” Throughout history, people have found their own ways to understand and interact with Connecticut’s landscape, from the Quinnipiac to geologists like Thorson. The lens through which peo-
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ple have interpreted these geologic landmarks has changed based on the era. But through it all, these natural landmarks have continually captivated the public’s interest and imagination. Now, more than ever, humans exert great control over their environments, shaping and re-shaping them at their whim –– as powerfully, in some senses, as continental plates. By recognizing this power, humans may begin to reconsider their relationship with the landscape. The New Haven community has done so by striving to co-live with natural spaces –– not only co-existing, but interacting with nature on a personal and daily level. The city of New Haven is nestled between the natural sanctuaries of East Rock and West Rock. Residents in the East Rock neighborhood live walking distance to the landmark. From organized hikes and runs to the Rock to Rock Earth Day bike race, community events show that New Haven would not be the same city without these parks. It is impossible to predict what the landscape will look like in 200 million years, or even in two hundred years. But geologists, historians, and residents alike all hope that these remarkable natural spaces will continue to be an integral part of New Haven’s identity. From the twelve-storied Kline Biology Tower on Science Hill of Yale’s campus, the view extends across the city. Looking out, one can see East Rock far in the distance, marked by the Sailors and Soldiers monument at its peak. Its tall and impres-
While human beings have only appeared for a sliver of a second on the geological clock, they’ve modified the landscape with impunity, from the quarrying of the colonists to the ambitious construction projects taking place today. 36
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sive cliffs seem unintimidating when looking at it from this height. Yet it’s impossible to forget what it feels like to stand at the base of the park: gazing upwards, at jagged rock against a blue sky. One human looking up at this towering structure made by the Earth. Small, but part of something bigger.
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ENDNOTE
A MAGE IN THE MAKING Raising a demonic army on Chapel Street is a great way to put off homework. Henry Reichard
T
he swarthy Hero of Iroas scowled, swept back his crimson cape, and put up his fists. Kytheon’s Irregulars drew their swords. The demonic Master of the Feast rose on his bat’s wings. Cameron surveyed his army, considered his odds, and called for a frontal assault. In that moment, I knew that I had him. It was a small mistake: a slight overextension of his forces, a bit of cockiness from an experienced mage who was certain his amateur adversary wouldn’t notice a blunder. But this was Magic: The Gathering — a trading card game where victory is often decided by the smallest of margins. Even a small mistake could be fatal. We were in Elm City Games, the city’s haven for Magic. When the first edition of the game was released in 1993, it was merely a fast-paced alternative to traditional roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons, but now the most valuable Magic cards fetch prices as high as $27,000, the best players sometimes live off their tournament earnings, and the game’s dilettantes number more than twenty million around the world. On many Friday and Saturday nights, ECG becomes what Brandon Patton, a frequent patron, calls an “oasis for misfits” –– a gathering place for professionals who take a trading card game far too seriously and for amateurs entranced by the metal mountains of Mirrodin, the vampire-infested bogs of Innistrad, and the shoguns of Kamigawa. My opponent was, at once, an aspiring doctor who played Magic with surgical precision and a mighty wizard called a planeswalker who could call on both the pure mana of the steppe and the necromancy of the swamp. Cameron was muscular, collected, confident –– not at all like the gangly gamers who usually frequent comic book stores and play Magic only after abandoning more macho pastimes such as Trivial Pursuit or Dungeons and Dragons. I had just watched him dismember his last opponent, dominating two games before I had finished one. I hadn’t played seriously in three years –– Magic doesn’t easily fit into a Yale schedule –– and Cameron must have sensed my ineptness before we even began playing, simply from the clumsy way I shuffled my deck of cards. But none of that mattered anymore. I knew that I had him. I drew a card, summoned a Seismic Elemental, then pushed all four of my creatures forward: the dragon, the elemental, and the two goblins –– too many for him to block with three of his creatures recovering from their recent charge and
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illustration by felicia chang
enough to finish him if they all landed their attacks. Silence hung over the table. And for the first time that night, I saw the Magic –– not the cards on the table, not the two young men craned over them in a noisy store smelling of fresh paint and body odor, but instead the two planeswalkers facing off on opposite ends of a charred steppe, the dragon with iron scales burning a hole in the dark sky, the elemental burrowing under the earth, the junior wizard inspecting his forces with a triumphant smirk, and the senior wizard clutching his staff, mumbling a futile counter-spell, his expression dazed, disbelieving, defeated. Smiling slightly, Cameron reached out over the table, pointed to Kytheon’s Irregulars, and told me he was tapping my dragon. “You’re what?” I said, glancing nervously at the irregulars. “I’m tapping your dragon,” he repeated. And there it was: a thin line of unremarkable text on the Kytheon’s Irregulars card that I had entirely forgotten. For two white mana, he could put any of my creatures to sleep. My dragon, overcome by a bout of uncharacteristic fatigue, fell out of the sky and decided to take a nap. My two goblins and my elemental, now leaderless, threw their pathetic spears and boulders at the opposing planeswalker. And then Cameron’s demon darkened the sky
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I had to write by Sunday. Cameron turned back to me and suggested we play another game with different decks. He is a medical student at Quinnipiac and doubtless had unwritten papers and unstudied flashcards in his world as well. But on this evening, he was not in that world. On this evening, he and I were planeswalkers –– powerful mages who were never tired or dispirited, who could flit effortlessly between alien realms, who had scoffed at the false gods of Theros and overpowered the titanic Eldrazi of Zendikar. Relaxing again, I drew my seven cards, considered my options, and told Cameron I was playing a Goblin Lackey. — Henry Reichard s a junior in Silliman College
and his irregulars stormed over the plain and he had me. The game was over, the Magic was broken, and I leaned back from the table, biting my lip. At least I had made it close. The next game was not close. At times I found my eyes drifting away from the card table to the store surrounding us. It was a game shop on Chapel Street, not far from the Green, with the convivial atmosphere of a secluded café. It had high ceilings, round playing tables, and row after row of board games, bags of twenty-sided die, and roleplaying rulebooks for Pathfinder, Dark Heresy, and three separate editions of Dungeons and Dragons lining the walls. Elm City Games opened a little over two years ago. Trish Loter and Matt Fantastic, its two owners, make a strong effort to promote a welcoming culture. “Magic, for us, is a passion, a labor of love,” Loter told me. “We don’t make a lot of money from Magic –– it’s one of our smallest margins. We do it because we like it.” On this night, there were only four of us in the store: Cameron, myself, a longtime player named Anthony (experienced enough to lose to Cameron stoically), and a new player named Robert, who angrily forfeited his game against Cameron on the third turn, stormed away, and declared that playing against him was “like trying to arm-wrestle with Mr. T.” Mr. T smiled at me good-naturedly after pinning my arm in the second game. A match was best two-out-of-three, so we were finished, and in the lull that followed I found myself thinking for the first time that night about the problem sets I had to finish, and the book I had to read, and the article 39 APRIL 2018
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CONGRATULATIONS TO THE NEW JOURNAL’S CLASS OF 2018: Ruby Bilger, Elena Saavedra Buckley, Victorio Cabrera, Philippe Chlenski, Elinor Hills, Rohan Naik, Jacob Sweet, Natalie Yang